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The 20 things we hate most about hotels

As a new series of The Hotel Inspector continues on Channel 5, the show's presenter Alex Polizzi and our inimitable columnist Anthony Peregrine reveal their hotel pet hates.

1. Towel art

Alex Polizzi: No one has ever been able to explain to me coherently why so many hotels insist on displaying towels on a bed rather than hanging them in a bathroom, which is where, after all, they are most likely to be needed. Even worse than simply folded towels are those that I come across that have been tortured into amusing shapes – fans, swans, isosceles triangles. Time after time I ask hoteliers what they think they are achieving with this irritating tic. Who thought of it first? And why is it so slavishly copied up and down the land? The slack-jawed owner usually shrugs his shoulders, bemused by my question and clearly considering “towel art” the height of chic…

2. A surfeit of cushions

Anthony Peregrine: It already takes me 20 minutes to move them all off the bed on to the armchairs before I retire. Any more, and they’re going out the window.

Four layers of cushions is three too manyCredit:
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3. Pillow menus

Alex Polizzi: Have you ever stayed at a hotel with a sheet or pillow menu? Exhausted by the myriad demands our complicated lives force upon us, must we now decide too whether we want to sleep on Egyptian cotton or linen or silk, and rest our heads upon Siberian goose down or duck down and feather? Has the hospitality industry fallen upon such parched times that it has to fall back on such gimmicks? Or are we really so extraordinarily spoilt that our bruised egos require these false panaceas? I want to stay in places where the hotelier has removed from me the diurnal cares of life, and decided upon my bed linen for me.

This really is unnecessaryCredit:
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4. Bathtubs in the bedroom

Anthony Peregrine: Think long and hard before placing a washbasin and/or the bath in the bedroom. This is still both rather trendy and terribly wrong. No one I have ever met wants to have a bath while his/her partner looks on. Baths have always been in bathrooms as horses have been in stables, for a very good reason.

No one I have ever met wants to have a bath while his/her partner looks onCredit:
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5. Theft-proof clothes hangers

Anthony Peregrine: I’m really not going to steal your clothes hangers. If I were contemplating a life of crime, I’d be holding up trains or abseiling into art galleries instead. So, from this moment on, make them removeable.

Who steals clothes hangers?!Credit:
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6. Bad coffee

Alex Polizzi: I indulge myself in all the common vices, but coffee drinking is my most habitual crutch. I use many shots of espresso during the long, slow days of filming.

After the first four series of Hotel Inspector, my production team brought me a Nespresso coffee maker, which is what I now lug about from hotel to hotel in my red leather bag. The team had become bored of my perennial lamentations about the quality of coffee I was offered in hotels that we featured. In an era that has seen even the most inveterate tea-drinking Britons casually ordering lattes, cappuccinos and flat whites; when we have several global brands of coffee house on every high street and a resurgence, too, of small, independent coffee outlets; when the provenance of coffee beans, the grinding criteria applied and the barista’s performance are matters of pride, why is it that so many British hotels still offer an uninspiring weak concoction, commonly called filter?

7. Trouser presses

Anthony Peregrine: Who, please tell me, uses the trouser press?! Furthermore, please put electrical sockets in places where normally constituted humans might reach them without injury. Behind the desk and up the wall beyond the reach of a baby giraffe are not those places.

Don't worry darling, they have a trouser pressCredit:
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8. Mealtime interruptions

Alex Polizzi: When I was doing my food-and-beverage training at the Mandarin Oriental, it was drummed into me that you should do your utmost to ensure that your service does nothing to interrupt the flow of conversation at a table. Not only should plates be put down and removed with the minimum disruption, but also glasses filled without the customer ever having to engage with the waiter.

I often think about this when I am eating somewhere and I am asked several times whether I am enjoying my meal. The only proper time to ask is at the very end of a meal, preferably when presenting the bill, so giving the customer the chance to express warm words of appreciation.

In my experience, if diners have something to complain about they probably will, and if plates are scraped clean there is no need to ask. It is usually the fear of supplying bad food or bad service that fuels a need for constant reassurance.

9. Obscene minibar prices

Anthony Peregrine: Don't even begin to think that your minibar policy is adequate. For a start, you more than likely charge for simply moving the mini-bottle of Scotch whisky, never mind drinking it. This, as you know full well, is insane. And what charges! How exactly do you justify the £10 that I faced recently for a mini-Grant’s? If I ever stooped to such lunacy, I could buy a mini-Scotch whisky in a shop for around £2. Hotels can probably get it for about £1. So that’s £9 profit on the assumption that some poor sucker (may I introduce myself?) is going to be so desperate that he’ll fork out more or less anything. And why is he so desperate? Because he can’t switch the b‑‑‑‑‑ bedroom lights off, that’s why. One last thing (it happens with increasing frequency): what is the point of having a minibar in the bedroom with absolutely nothing in it? Do please tell.

Little bottles of Scotch should not cost £10Credit:
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10. Porters fishing for tips

Alex Polizzi: To tip or not to tip? There is no simple answer. I was once stopped at the door of a restaurant in New York because I had left only 12.5 per cent, not the expected 15 per cent. Though some claim American service is the best in the world, that constant hounding for tips is something I have never got used to and dislike intensely.Britain is still not, thank goodness, like the US in this regard, but it is difficult when there is already a service charge added to your bill to know whether to leave a cash tip on top. I never do unless I have experienced truly exemplary service. Porters are paid to bring bags up to rooms, waiters to serve food, concierges to answer questions. As housekeepers tend not to get tips, rather like gardeners and reception staff, I usually ask how tips are shared out and, if the answer is to my liking, I will leave an amount to go into the pot. But not as a matter of course, and all the hovering in the world is more likely to make me dig my heels in rather than put my hand in my pocket.

Anthony Peregrine: I hate the receptionist, porter or anyone else accompanying me to my room on arrival. This is so evidently a tip-generating ploy that I occasionally want to bark with annoyance. “Is this the bathroom?” I ask. We are standing in a small room surrounded by a bath, a washbasin and a lavatory. “Yes,” says the young uniformed person before leaving, untipped.

No tips todayCredit:
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11. Bad lighting

Alex Polizzi: I am never without a novel when I am travelling, and I am often astonished at how many hotel bedrooms are bare of any alternative light source to the main ceiling light, at least in the kinds of places I stay in. I have encountered fluorescent strip lighting at the Mansion Lions in Eastbourne, and the single-switch option of the Oakland Hotel in Essex, which forced me, after I had turned it off at the door, into a rather tentative stagger to bed, hands outstretched in the darkness. I’m equally irriated by the well-meaning but ineffective use of lots of low-wattage bulbs, which may well be saving the planet, but at the cost of my eyesight.

Anthony Peregrine: Please install room lighting systems comprehensible to, say, the average university graduate. This means a switch by the door to work a central light, plus switches on either side of the bed that will work both this central light and the bedside lights. And that’s enough. Trying to turn off all the lights, only to find that this operation turns on two standard lamps fashioned like swordfish over by the desk… well, thus do grown men weep. Life gets even worse when turning off the swordfish lamps brings all the other ones back on again.

There is nothing that deflates a holidaymaker’s excitement more than a tatty frontage, but you would be amazed how often I’m confronted by this in my line of work. And often a tatty exterior can be doing a disservice to what’s inside.

Take my recent visit to a hotel in Newquay. My first impression could not have been worse: a squat ugly building on a main road, draped in tatty Sky Sports advertising, it didn’t seem to have a single redeeming feature. I knew that it was one of those hotels aimed at coach companies, and that the owner provided dinner, bed, breakfast and evening entertainment for the princely sum of £14 per person, per night. The admittedly tiny but immaculate rooms and bathrooms were the first surprise; the three courses of proper food made in- house from real ingredients were the next. It was lovely to be reminded that in unpromising surroundings you can find value for money and a hotel owner who cares passionately about her guests. Still, those qualities are even more reason to tidy up the exterior.

13. Bath butlers

Alex Polizzi: There is something ridiculous about the idea of a “bath butler”. I cannot think of anything less conducive to relaxation than, while you wait in a towelling robe, having a stranger hanging about and asking what temperature you like the water (“Er, I don’t know, actually. Usually I just stick my hand in and see if it feels about right.”), and whether, on reflection, you might not prefer the bubble bath to the bath salts.

I am probably horribly old-fashioned for even suggesting this, but surely a hotel that needs to enhance its guest experience by offering this service cannot be sufficiently honed in the skills I have always considered the hallmarks of a good or even great hotel: prompt and efficient service, comfortable, clean and well-designed rooms, wonderful food and every attention offered to ensure your stay is just as you had hoped it would be.

Deficiencies in any of these can never be compensated for by the offer of someone paid to turn on my taps.

14. Children’s menus

Alex Polizzi: Why do hotels assume that all children eat only breaded protein, chips, pizza and pasta with tomato sauce? Open as I am to all accusations of being a smug, middle-class mother, surely mine is not the only child who eats normal food? I mean fish – beyond goujons of sole – rice, green vegetables, lamb, beef, something resembling the food we adults eat. I dread facing a “kids’” menu.

15. Ridiculous reading material

Anthony Peregrine: A short round-up of hotel facilities and local attractions is always acceptable. Altogether less acceptable are the magazines found only in luxury hotel rooms. They are called Tendances15 or £black Horizons, have advertisements for Dior, Givenchy and Jean-Paul Gaultier, pictures of women wearing clothes that no other woman will ever wear and articles about the brand ambassador for cutting-edge Italian handkerchief design (“Umbria is my inspiration!”) These publications serve only to drive normal people into the arms of political fanatics. Bin them.

Throw away the arty magsCredit:
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16. Pillow chocolates

Anthony Peregrine: Do answer the question: “Pillow chocolates: yes or no?” with a “No”. One has just cleaned one’s teeth, for heaven’s sake. Those vast bowls of fruit provided in top-class hotels, though thoughtful, are also ill advised. There’s always far too much (they’d do me a year) and also a knife and fork. Who eats a banana with a knife and fork?

I've just brushed my teeth!Credit:
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17. Notes from the manager

Anthony Peregrine: Don't bother leaving printed notes from the manager, saying that he or she and the staff are going to do their utmost to make my stay pleasurable. I don’t get notes from the greengrocer, insisting that his aim is my fruit’n’veg enjoyment. Or from my doctor, saying he wants to make me better. I just sort of assume it. The only reason for a note would be if it were unexpected, as in: “Ha, customer: p‑‑‑ off.”

18. Pretending to care about the environment

Anthony Peregrine: Continue putting notices in the bathroom, pointing out that not changing towels is saving polar bears. But do also expect us to mock because if you were so concerned about conservation, you’d (a) not have put half a ton of fruit on the lounge table and (b) have provided somewhere to hang the towels where they might dry.

19. Complicated controls

Anthony Peregrine: Don't overestimate the appeal of domotics. Many hotel clients, including myself, are of a generation trained to turn on heating by hand. We’re also skilled at opening curtains manually. We don’t need to do it by smartphone from the other side of the Atlantic. And if we did need to, we couldn’t, because we don’t understand how the b‑‑‑‑‑ thing works. And every time we try, we get details of traffic jams in Strasbourg. Just stop it, please. And, while you’re about it, simplify the television remote control. I want to watch the late night soccer or, you know, a nature documentary on the termites of Namibia; what I don’t want is to have to tangle with three different satellite dishes, 47 (forty-seven) buttons, bursts of Uzbek folk dancing and hard-core porn before bumping yet again into CNN and its sheet-metal-voiced female presenters who never sleep.

Which button turns off the lights?Credit:
currahee_shutter - Fotolia

20. Absent mattress and pillow protectors

Alex Polizzi: Mattress protector and pillow protectors are now considered standard, right? After all, we do know, even if we would rather not think about it too hard, what occurs on a hotel bed before we have the privilege of occupying it. One resilient hotelier I know has resorted to providing a price list to incoming stag parties, to avoid any arguments about the costs he adds to a bill when a mattress is rendered unusable. Apparently, offenders pay up happily, relieved of any shame by the straightforward nature of the transaction.

Should the hotel you are staying in not take stag parties, consider for a moment the drool that even the most upright of us occasionally exude, and check that your bed is supplied with mattress and pillow protectors.